Esalen and the American Academy of Asian Studies

Richard Price and Michael Murphy, 1982

The Esalen Institute was founded in 1962 by two close friends,
Michael Murphy and Richard Price. The story of their meeting, their friendship,
and their founding of Esalen is inextricably bound up with the American
Academy of Asian Studies and its leading faculty, Frederic Spiegelberg,
Haridas Chaudhuri, and Alan Watts. Walter Truett Anderson
tells the story in his book Upstart Spring: Esalen and the American Awakening
(1983), from which the following quotes are taken.

Michael Murphy graduated from Stanford in 1952. During
his sophomore year, he had a life-changing encounter-- with Frederic
Spiegelberg, the first director of the American Academy of Asian
Studies. Spiegelberg had been recruited to direct the
Academy by its founder, businessman
Louis Gainsborough.

Every university has its academic stars, spellbinders
who can dazzle a lecture hall full of students and lure their minds for
an hour or so away from sex and football. One of the spellbinders at Stanford
was Frederic Spiegelberg, of the Asian studies department. Spiegelberg,
a refugee from Hitler's Germany, was a product of the great burst of intellectual
activity that had flowered in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.

He was a colleague and friend of two of the leading existentialists,
Martin Heidegger and Paul Tillich. He himself was one of Europe's leading
scholars of Oriental religion and, unlike many such scholars, had the ability
to communicate his knowledge; his courses at Stanford were immensely popular.

Murphy didn't get around to hearing one of Spiegelberg's
lectures until his sophomore year, when he stumbled into it by chance.
The administration had switched lecture halls for Spiegelberg's
course on the third day of the quarter, because the enrollment had outgrown
the space originally assigned to it. Murphy came into the lecture hall
for a social psychology course he was taking, and found that it had been
moved elsewhere. He decided to stay around and hear Spiegelberg.
Spiegelberg had just returned from a sabbatical year in India, where
he had visited Sri Aurobindo, religious mystic, social activist, and head
of the great ashrarn at Pondicherry, and the religious leader Ramana Maharshi.

Spiegelberg lectured that
day on the Vedic hymns, and he talked about the Brahman, rolling out the
name Of THE BRAHMAN in a sonorous voice that seemed to carry within its
own resonance all the grandeur of the Hindi concept of the great spirit
of the universe. Murphy had never been exposed to these concepts before,
nor had he ever read any of the Eastern religious texts. But when he walked
back to the fraternity house for lunch that day, he knew that his world
had changed.

The only immediate outward change was in his class schedule;
he dropped the social psychology course and stayed with Spiegelberg
that quarter as the professor unfolded his vision of the perennial philosophy
contained in Eastern religion. He still lived in the fraternity house,
although he had begun to dislike it even before his encounter with Spiegelberg.
He also began to meditate....

Murphy went back to Stanford in the fall. He was still
living at the fraternity house and still enrolled in the premedical program,
but his way of living was beginning to feel more and more like a thin outer
shell, ready to crack......Finally, he realized that the time had come
to do what he really wanted to do-forget about medicine and set out on
the path of spiritual exploration.

So, in mid-January of his junior year at Stanford, Murphy
moved out of the fraternity house and took a room in an old building in
Palo Alto called the Frenchman's Tower, where he spent eight hours a day
meditating-four hours early in the morning, four hours later in the afternoon.
He notified his parents that he did not intend to go on to medical school,
and took a job hashing in the fraternity house, because he felt guilty
about accepting their money. His plan was to drop out for the spring quarter
and take some classes in San Francisco at the American Academy of Asian
Studies, an institution Spiegelberg [was directing], and then to
go back to Stanford to study religion and philosophy.....Murphy proceeded
with his plan. He dropped out for the spring quarter to study in San Francisco,
then went back to Stanford....

Murphy graduated in 1952, and was drafted not long afterward....Less
than two years later, Michael completed his army service and returned to
Stanford to go to graduate school. He was trying to map out some reasonably
respectable way to pursue his interests, a career that would relate to
his own needs and still look good in Salinas. He thought he would get a
Ph.D. in philosophy and become a professor so he could pass on to future
generations of students the teachings that inspired him.

However, Murphy found that graduate study in philosophy
made no room for the kinds of spiritual explorations that had become central
to his life, and after two years he left Stanford and went to India, where
he spent 16 months in Pondicherry, at the Sri Aurobindo ashram, which he
had first heard about from Frederic Spiegelberg. When he returned
he lived in Palo Alto, taking odd jobs, meditating, reading, and writing.
Then,

In 1960 he moved to San Francisco and took a room in a
pleasant old brick mansion on the fringes of Golden Gate Park that had
been converted-- by a man named Haridas Chaudhuri, an Aurobindo
follower-- into a living and meditation center [the Cultural Integration
Fellowship], a low-keyed urban ashram. Here he felt less isolated than
he had in Palo Alto, and had the opportunity to be around a rapidly growing
number of people who were interested in the same things as he was.

Haridas Chaudhuri was a scholar
of Indian religions who had come from India
to the United States in 1951 at the invitation of Frederic Spiegelberg
to teach at the American Academy of Asian Studies.
Chaudhuri was one of the key faculty members at the
Academy of Asian Studies, where Murphy first met him.

One day a young man named Richard Price came by the house.
Price said a friend of his had suggested he look up Murphy. They exchanged
some information and discovered they had been classmates at Stanford-not
only classmates, but psychology majors as well. Probably they had sat in
some of the same overcrowded postwar classes together. It was not surprising
that they had not become acquainted in those days, but it seemed almost
providential that now, after all these years, two 1952 Stanford psychology
graduates should both be dropouts in San Francisco, meditating and studying
Oriental religions.

After graduating from Stanford in 1952, Price had spent
some time as a graduate student in psychology, first at Harvard, and then
at Berkeley. But he found graduate school unsatisfying, and unsure what
to do with his life, he enlisted in the army.

In the long and easygoing days of training-camp routine,
there was plenty of time for unstructured philosophical bull sessions without
the sense of pressure and competitiveness that had always lurked about
the edges of such conversations at Harvard. After a while he got into a
schedule of night duty that was flexible enough to allow him time to take
some courses at Berkeley or Stanford. He decided to see what was going on
at Stanford, and in the spring quarter of 1955 he enrolled in classes there.
One of them was taught by Frederic Spiegelberg.

The contact with Spiegelberg was not quite the
instant epiphany it had been for Michael Murphy a few years earlier, but
it produced, over time, an equally profound change in the course of Price's
life. He had never been interested in religion, which seemed to him to
be nothing more than a system of deceit that existed mainly to enforce
social rules of behavior. Yet he found himself oddly moved by the content
of Spiegelberg's presentation. It was the first time he had experienced
religion as something that might relate to his own life.

In one of his lectures Spiegelberg mentioned a
yogi who was giving a talk at the Vedanta Society, and Price went to hear
him. Again he found himself, somewhat to his surprise, quite impressed.
Later he went to hear another lecturer Spiegelberg recommended,
an Englishman named Alan Watts, a former Episcopalian minister who
had become a student of Zen Buddhism. Watts was not just studying
Zen; he was making something new out of it, synthesizing it with ideas
from some of the more adventurous realms of Western psychology. At Watts's
lecture Price heard, for the first time, of a man named Frederick Perls,
who had developed a system of therapy based on awareness of one's own mind
and body. Watts also spoke of Wilhelm Reich's ideas about how the
human organism is damaged by the socially enforced repression of its instinctual
drives. Price had heard Reich mentioned in the psychology departments,
of course, but only as a crazy man with a weird invention, not as somebody
whose ideas were of any value.

Price began taking courses at the Academy of Asian
Studies, where Watts was the star attraction. Watts was
rapidly becoming a leading popularizer of Zen Buddhist ideas, and in San
Francisco he was the intellectual mentor of a group of young writers and
artists who were trying to make Zen-or something that sounded like Zen-a
part of a new Zeitgeist. Time declared, in the summer of 1958, that "Zen
Buddhism is growing more chic by the minute," and took note of Watts
as its leading American interpreter; a similar article in the Nation a
few months later called him "the brains and the Buddha of American
Zen." These were the people who became known as the Beat Generation,
whose moment in time was called the Beat Scene.

The Beat Scene was part literary movement, part tourist
attraction. On the literary front it was represented by such writers as
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Gary Snyder, all
of whom came to Watts's lectures and wove Zen themes into their
writings. Kerouac's novel The Dharma Bums was the best known of these efforts.
It was a novelized paean to Zen and the free-flowing West Coast Bohemian
life style. The Dharma Bums was an easily decoded roman a clef: its chief
character, Japhy Ryder, was based on Gary Snyder, and also visible in its
pages are Allen Ginsberg as the poet Alvah Goldbook (author of a poem entitled
Wail), and Alan Watts as Arthur Whane. Snyder was the most serious
scholar of the lot; he had studied Zen in Japan and had translated some
Chinese Zen poems into English.

The tourist aspect of the scene centered on San Francisco's
old Italian district of North Beach, which now suddenly blossomed with
art galleries and hip hangouts, like The Place and the Co-Existence Bagel
Shop, where young people and not-so-young people came to live out the 1950s
version of la vie boheme. The clientele there was a melange of artists,
writers, neighborhood hangers-on, tourists, and San Francisco businessmen
who hurried home to shed their buttondown shirts for black turtlenecks,
and hurried back to where the action was.

Price took a room at the Academy and began spending
more time in San Francisco, studying Buddhism and watching the Beat Scene
unfold around him.

After living for a while at the Academy of Asian Studies,
Price married a woman he had met there. But not long after that,
he suffered a nervous breakdown, and spent the next few years recovering
in a clinic on the east coast and then with family in Chicago. Then, in
1960, he felt strong enough to return to a normal life, and he left Chicago
to return to San Francisco. It was shortly after his return that a friend
of his told him to look up someone named Michael Murphy, who had just moved
into the Cultural Integration Fellowship of Haridas Chaudhuri.
After their initial meeting, Murphy and Price quickly became close friends.
After a few months,

Price and Murphy were both trying to keep their expenses
down. Price had some stock and the money he had saved while working for
the beer-sign business in Chicago; Murphy had a two-day-a-week job as a
copyreader for a trade magazine called the Paciflc Shipper. The publisher
at the Shipper decided he needed a full-time copyreader, and asked Murphy
to work full time or quit. He quit.

Murphy had been playing around with the idea of going
down to live at Big Sur. The Big House, the house his grandparents had
built for themselves, was standing empty. Dr. Murphy was dead, and Bunny,
now in her eighties, rarely went there anymore. Dennis was living in his
own house, carousing around and working on a second novel. The property
south of the creek was now a resort motel, Slate's Hot Springs. He could
live in the Big House for nothing and probably find a part-time job.

This seemed to be the time to try it, since he was out
of work anyway. He talked it over with Price and invited him to come along.
There was plenty of room. They would just go down there and see how it
felt; if they didn't like it, they could always go back to San Francisco.
If they did like it, they could stay on indefinitely, meditate, and read....

Michael Murphy was naturally distressed by what had become
of his old family vacation spot, the place he and Price had come to in
search of a haven for meditation and study, Sometimes he thought about
taking it over and running the business himself.

This was an idea that he had toyed with before, from time
to time.... He thought he would run the motel and also hold some lectures
and educational programs there as a side line....

He and Price talked about the possibility of such a venture
with a growing sense of enthusiasm. It made sense to them. Alan Watts
was already holding occasional weekend seminars in the area, sometimes
at the Big Sur Gallery and sometimes at the house of the architect Nathaniel
Owings. Probably Watts could be persuaded to use the lodge for his
lectures; other programs of that sort might be put on there as well. This
would augment the motel and restaurant operation, and also serve to change
the tone of the place bring in people who were more interested in religion
and philosophy, less given to knocking each other down.

Murphy and Price agreed that their programs would be open
and flexible, not wedded to any particular school or discipline. They would
establish a center for the exploration of new ideas. The guiding principle
would be synthesis: the flowing-together of East and West, the ancient
and the modern, science and religion, scholarship and art....

Some time during the spring and summer of 1961, the project
became more concrete....As the plans for taking over the hot springs became
a reality, Murphy and Price went seeking advice and support. They talked
to Frederic Spiegelberg, and the courtly old professor, who knew
all kinds of people, was most helpful. They talked with Alan Watts,
whom they had first met through Spiegelberg. They talked with Gregory
Bateson, whom Price had known at Stanford. They wrote to Aldous Huxley
and went to see Gerald Heard. Such contacts as these were the beginning
of what was to become a formidable cadre of philosophers, psychologists,
artists, writers, theologians, and wise souls who took an interest in their
project, gave them suggestions, and agreed to come to Big Sur to lead seminars.
It helped, each time they approached some new luminary, to be able to mention
the other people of stature who were involved already. And so the circle
widened....

Slate's Hot Springs was now officially under new management.
Price moved over to the lodge, into a room that became a combination bedroom
and office. Michael stayed in the Big House. They had agreed that Price
would be in charge of the resort and that Murphy would go to work lining
up the seminar programs. But it would not be a complete division of responsibilities;
they would work together on all parts of the operation.

In January of 1962 Alan Watts gave a seminar at
the lodge. This was one of his own programs, attended by his own private
clientele and not organized by Murphy and Price, but it was an opportunity
to give the place a test run, to get a little philosophy vibrating through
its rooms.....

[Watts] had visited Carl Jung and had lectured
at the Jung Institute in Zurich in 1958, and he had been impressed by Jung's
abandonment of formal lectures in favor of seminars that lasted for a weekend
or some comparable period of time. In these seminars an instructor and
a group of students would work together more or less continuously, with
plenty of time for questions and discussion. On his return to California,
Watts (who had left the Academy of Asian Studies) began to
hold private seminars based on this model. He gradually built up a clientele
for such events, a loose aggregation of followers who would be notified
by mail in advance of the next seminar. The sessions were held here and
there, mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area, sometimes in Los Angeles,
usually in the homes of friends or students, for people interested in the
subjects he liked to call "these things." Watts had many
friends in the Big Sur area, a place he had been attracted to ever since
he first drove up that coast on his way to San Francisco, and often gave
seminars there, too. So the precedent had been set, and when Watts
gave his first seminar at Slate's Hot Springs, sitting in front of the
old stone fireplace, drinking an occasional beer, and conversing with a
couple of dozen people about these things, it was not a leap into the unknown,
only a continuation....

Thus was the Esalen Institute born out of the extraordinary
crucible of the American Academy of Asian Studies.